my thoughts on…

I was once an art student at SAIC in Chicago. Back then, I had never been on my own before, and found myself living in a swank studio apartment dorm. It was an exciting “leaving the nest” experience, but what I remember most of the time wasn’t the rose-tinted luxuries, rather the white overcast sky and the fog hugging the tops of the sky-scrapers.

What my eyes saw each day was pretty bleak, and not just due to the lake effect weather. My fellow “avant-garde” as well as the homeless wanderers on the street that I saw each and every day when I commuted to class, set the tone for a weird internal interlude of my life that I now loosely refer to as “back when I was in college”.

I went to the community college in Las Vegas for three years prior to being accepted to Chicago. My desert life was comfortable, social, and somewhat balanced… so as any proper creative person would do in that situation, I started looking for a way out. I could hardly imagine leaving my beloved mentors to pursue my desires elsewhere, but I knew it was what I had to do.

I quickly realized only a couple of weeks into my first semester, that the prestigious art school was not the place for me. In fact, there were many aspects of it that I loathed. It glorified many things I detest, and the students there were like monks to a religion I was at war with: contemporary art.

Due to this sudden and drastic unease with my surroundings, I withdrew and kept to myself. The silence allowed my mind plenty of room to stretch out and process things: primarily thoughts about what I was doing and who I was.

That weirdly acidic, white, cold, and generally uninviting setting is also where I found myself in my first machine shop and met the person I would grow to become today. Even if I had no way of knowing it at the time, I was finally on a course to becoming who I wanted to be. In this unlikely place, I felt like a sapling growing in spite of layers of concrete and bricks towards sunlight.

Some time at the beginning of 2011, the maybe-roboticist Sarah woke one morning and seemingly from nowhere decided she really, reallyaught to make a mask. I had never done so before, and prior to that day hadn’t any interest in doing so… but alas, on a wild whim, did the research, bought the materials, and prepared to cast my own face in the bathroom of my dorm.

Over two weeks of casting, sculpting, and scavenging, I built what I now call “Merca” – which is a crude-looking thing that has a significant amount of meaning to me. Now many years later, I understand why I woke that morning and so urgently decided to do what I did.

Masks are curious things. We wear them for reasons that are almost contradictory. They are symbolic of hiding, but they are also tied to the concept of acting, or assuming a role. When someone puts on a mask, they aren’t just concealing themselves, they’re also becoming something different entirely.

It’s more than that though. Masks effect us profoundly. If someone puts on the mask of a wolf, without realizing it… they start to subtly enact their perception of what a wolf is like. If someone puts on the mask of a devil, they become devious. When we witness ourselves in a new face, we begin acting as what we see ourselves as. We role-play. The funny thing however, is once the mask is removed, the identity that was borrowed doesn’t magically get taken away along with it. It becomes a part of you. It sticks with you forever… whether you have the mask on anymore or not.

The mask asks a question of us that we answer through our actions. By answering, we welcome the consideration of something other than who we are, and as a result expand our definition of self to include the answer we devise of. By putting it on, we give the mask permission to infuse us with whatever it suggests we might otherwise be.

I made Merca that day because I subconsciously recognized a change happening within me. The change had to do with adaption; how I was morphing or masquerading as something else in order to survive in my new home. It was also in recognition that what I was pretending to be was not natural to me. It wasn’t a welcomed response, but one that happened out of necessity, in light of being thrust into a new life in a new place.

My mentor told me I would move away from Vegas one day. Maybe I’d come back, maybe I wouldn’t… but in either case, if I did… I wouldn’t be the same person. This sounded dramatic and ominous- but of course he was right.

As a result of persisting through concrete and stone, the sapling develops unusual roots and a twisted form. This was me now. The mask represented my pseudo self. It was the ingenuine me I assumed in Chicago that stuck around even after I took the mask off and moved away. But it also represented the part of me that pretended to be stronger than I was, until I was stronger. Like my mentor predicted, I came home different, but I came home better.

Sarah has always loved machines, but now she knew she could machine them. She was awed by technology, but now had an open invitation to create her own. Contemporary art had always left a sour taste in her mouth, but now she understood the shape of the fruit she was tasting, and could appreciate the bitterness for the beautiful form it came from. That’s growth, y’all.

I moved back home to Las Vegas, Summer of 2011, just a hand-full of months after I smeared petroleum jelly all over my face and laid strips of plaster-gauze all over it. I had this mask in tow to show for it. When I put it on back then, whether I realized it or not, I was becoming the person I am right now. My other face was the new me.

We should all talk about sex. Guys… gals… guys with gals. Everyone should feel comfortable talking with one another casually about sex and sexuality. Not out of perversion. Not out of lack of morality. Not in abandonment of social tact or the construct of “class”, but because our inability and unwillingness to normalize our most basic human right as animals is damaging to our relationship with one another.- and with ourselves.

Damaging. Yes. When I grew up, no one talked to me about fucking. The only cue I received from the world was that I should avoid engaging in sexual relations with guys. The world insinuated that if I did let another person enter my body, I was losing some loosely defined game; I was giving something up, or rather… that something was being taken from me by the other person. It was impressed upon me that my role in regard to sex and sexuality was that of victim. So I avoided it.

This underdeveloped concept of intimacy and sex eventually lead me into a slew of highly abusive, and outright heinous relationships with other men. I found myself with them, accepting their way of relating to me because I didn’t know any better. How could I? Their way of treating me became my base-line… one that has slowly been dragged into a better place over time. But you can still see the marks in the sand as a clear indicator of where it was dragged from.

It needs to be said. I never enjoyed sex physically until I was 24-years-old, the day I accidentally had my first orgasm in the bathroom of my college dorm while using a tiny bullet vibrator. When it happened, I had no clue what had happened. I was completely confused but pleasantly excited for the rest of the day because I had finally discovered what all the fuss was about.

Up until that fateful day with my “Adam and Eve” vibrator (that I only brought with me to college because my boyfriend expressed an interest in watching me use it), I believed that when I became aroused, this meant I was climaxing. I thought I was getting off, when in reality… I was just getting on; for the vast, disgusting percentage of it all, I didn’t even experience as much as that. Sex was primarily performative. Expressing enjoyment was not for myself, it was for the other party. It was to heighten their experience of me… like I were a ride at a theme park. I did this because I was afraid of the truth only I was aware of: That when I was being fucked, I felt nothing, it came to mean nothing, and that I hated it. I hated sex.

So there and then, at the humble age of 24, I begun my journey. I started to slowly understand who and what I was as a sexual being. I’m not that much older now, and I see that I have a long way to go until I feel better. “Better” being a vague term, used purposely.

A byproduct of this unengaged relationship with sex has been an almost radical denial of my biology; as if I were a mind-brain functioning in a vat of fluid, rather than a human. This is something that has flipped almost entirely 180 degrees in the past five years. I have a new wonder for my body and its desires; the ones I notice that I can’t control, and the ones I feel but can’t understand. They are my new favorite qualities about my self.

A 30-year-old woman now, as much as I despise babies and the concept of motherhood, I feel this overwhelming need to choose the right mate to produce a genetic flesh cocktail with. I see the men in my life differently, and this is good. Where as young Sarah chose her boyfriends and lovers for their intellectual merit alone, adult Sarah seems to gravitate towards the guy that smells good in just the right way, and causes the right neurons to fire when they touch me (I realize this is usually the opposite for most).

I have to point out that my current position isn’t all bad. Coming into my own sexual awareness so late in the game feels as though I’m binge watch a really good TV series that everyone else had to experience one episode at a time, once a week. This clearly defined and vibrant energy is something I can harness and use as inspiration to create things… and do things. It’s an awakening and it feels wonderful, if only in the same way we enjoy a rainbow after, and because of a storm.

I do think that if society, people, humans knew themselves enough to normalize an open discourse with one another regarding sex, I would have found myself in a better place when I was young. Since I can’t change anything about the past, the most I can do right now is enact the change I would like to see take place.

SEX. I talk about it. With people I know. With people I don’t know. During the night. During the day. In private. On my streams. If it comes up in conversation, I wont dance around it or talk in code. I think this is doing the younger generation a better service than to insinuate through uncomfortable silence that our most basic right as animals is a tabu.

I’m writing this because it’s my nature to disclose pretty much anything and everything that skirts through my mind. I find that the seemingly unmanageable monsters of my life are deflated, simply by saying their names out loud. So, that is what I’m doing right now. Also, by sharing my feelings, I’m more likely to find others who relate to what I’m going through. So if you’re one of them, hello!

Things are different now. I’m entering a new decade of my life and my self-image has changed drastically without my own permission. Ten years ago, when I first shouted “CHARGE!” And ran head first into battle, I thought of myself as a smart, sexy, young thing that couldn’t help but be liked by everyone and as a result was strong and unstoppable. The world was mine. The present was my time. I had all the energy I needed backing me up.

But you know where this is going. We climb our mountains and eventually find ourselves questioning the stamina we were once certain we had. I suppose I’m there.

If you ask me what I “do for a living”, I will tell you that “I am an artist”. I’m also just as broke and aimless as the title suggests. I knew long ago when I first put my chips on the table what I was signing up for. I’m not surprised by the grinding and chafing inflicted by the unpaved road I’ve been dragging myself along, but I am marred to the point that I can’t recognize myself anymore.

Additionally, who knew that this fresh era of my life would begin simultaneously with heaping gobs of social disillusionment. After eight years of relative optimism, I’m again parsing broken expectations as our country is led into shady uncertainty by a brand new shit storm. So this is the theme of now.

There is a metaphor in my comic, relating life to a stormy ocean. We either (a) drown, (b) wash out somewhere safely stranded on an island we can never escape, or (c) we fight and struggle to keep swimming.

At times we find chunks of debris to hold onto for a while and there happens to be someone else clinging along with us; cosmically at the same place at the same time.

The water is rough, but I know I’m not alone. That is why I’m writing today, and will continue to write from this point on. By continuing to call out the monster’s name, I want this little shitty piece of debris that I find myself on to become a raft. We don’t have to stay here forever, but it’s nice to catch your breath for a while before continuing to paddle on.